By Bob Brady, BLR Founder and CEO

Looking down the long rows of booths at the 10th annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition (Chicago, October 10-12, 2007), it's clear that vendors think they know what HR needs: Talent Suites.

These (at least theoretically) are integrated applications for things like sourcing and recruiting, performance management, succession planning, and compensation. They pick up where administrative HRIS systems leave off, bridging the gap between HR professionals and all of the functional managers who are HR's internal customers.

In the exposition hall, there were dozens and dozens of vendors, ranging from giants like Oracle/PeopleSoft and SAP to smaller players like HRsmart and TEDS.

As you sit through demos of their products, it is hard not to be impressed. Gone are the hard-to-manipulate interfaces that take weeks of training and an IT degree to use. Taleo, Vurv, Authoria, and many others have slick front ends like the best consumer websites. They are easy to use and intuitive--even fun if you are an HR groupie.

The promise that they hold out, "make HR a real strategic player by providing it with tools that make everyone in the organization better" is pretty grand, and it is hard not to be impressed with the progress. Yet many of the analysts and speakers were cautious.

Their message: Yes, there is a lot of innovation and potential, but there is also a lot of risk. Naomi Bloom, a well-respected independent consultant (her company is Bloom and Wallace), said, "There are too many vendors in a lot of things. Take a hard look at the implications of being orphaned if the vendor you select is not around next year."

She appeared in a panel, "Today's Technology Trends and Predictions," along with Jason Corsello, VP, Knowledge Infusion; James Holincheck, VP, Gartner Group; and Lisa Rowan, program director, IDC.

Highlights included:

• "You need to think in terms getting to a 'talent system of record,' like you have an administrative system of record," Holincheck said. "It doesn't have to necessairly come from a single vendor, but there has to be a strategy for getting them to talk to each other."
• "I recently had an 'A Ha!' moment when I did some psychometric testing on myself," Rowan said. "The tools were very good. My point: think about better use of the tools you already have."
• "We're not even close to having an integrated suite," Corsello said. "We're at year three of a seven year cycle."

Software as a Service (SaaS)

While the members of this panel were all cautious, they were united on one thing: Software as a service. SaaS (pronounced "sass," but not to be confused with the software company SAS, also an exhibitor) has potential to be a true game changer.

This is different than traditional software in that companies don't own their own copies of the software and they don't install it on their own machines. Instead, the program sits out on the web, where the same program is used by all of the provider's customers (similar to the way Google and Amazon.com work). SalesForce.com is one of the best-known examples.

This has tremendous implications for small and medium sized companies for whom the cost of installing one of these systems is daunting--if not completely out of reach. A SaaS system, if and when it finally arrives, could truly deliver on the promise of a high-powered system that would be affordable for all. It will never be cheap because so much of the cost is in the work of implementation.

There are lots of concerns about privacy and confidentiality when you start putting your employee data out on somebody else's machines via the web and a host of other problems, but the Nirvana of IT-less software is very attractive.

Our take: The moderator of the panel, Human Resource Executive Technology Columnist Bill Kutik, has posed, "Kutik's rule." "Something new has to be seen by the 'chattering classes' for seven years as the 'best thing since sliced bread' before it gets widespread adoption." That would mean we've got several more years to wait. In the meantime, keep watching and experimenting on small things where the payback can be fast. It's still not time for most companies to consider long-term investments.